“This hefty collection of all [Crane’s] verse, all the published prose, and much of [his] correspondence … instantly becomes the standard edition.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Overview

Table of Contents

Overview

No American poet has so swiftly and decisively transformed the course of poetry as Hart Crane. In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called “the broken world.”

White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane’s masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot’s The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day.

This edition is the largest collection of Crane’s writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane’s letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry.

His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time.

This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane’s life as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane’s correspondents.

Langdon Hammer, editor, is Chair of the English Department at Yale University, and is the author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism and, with Brom Weber, the editor of O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is currently writing a biography of the poet James Merrill.

Key West: An Island Sheaf
Carib Isle!
The Mermen
To the Cloud Juggler
The Mango Tree
Island Quarry
Old Song
The Idiot
A Name for All
Bacardi Spreads the Eagle’s Wing
Imperator Victus
Royal Palm
The Air Plant
The Hurricane
Key West
—And Bees of Paradise
To Emily Dickinson
Moment Fugue
By Nilus Once I Knew . . .
To Shakespeare

Poems Published in Magazines
C 33
October-November
Carmen de Boheme
The Hive
Fear
Annunciations
Echoes
The Bathers
Modern Craft
Exile
Postscript
Forgetfulness
To Portapovitch
Legende
Interior
Porphyro in Akron
A Persuasion
Three Locutions des Pierrots
The Great Western Plains
America’s Plutonic Ecstasies
Interludium
March
The Broken Tower

Unpublished Poems and Fragments
A Song for Happy Feast Days
Sonnet
The Moth That God Made Blind
To Earth
Medusa
Meditation
Episode of Hands
The Bridge of Estador
After Jonah
Euclid Avenue
To Buddha
“Where gables pack the rainless”
Well / Well / Not-At-All
Of an Evening
What Nots ?
In a Court
With a Photograph to Zell, Now Bound for Spain
“This way where November takes the leaf”
“You are that frail decision that devised”
“Thou canst read nothing except through appetite”
To Liberty
Mirror of Narcissus
The Masters
“Her eyes had the blue of desperate days”
“O moon, thou cool sibilance of the sun, we utmost love”
Lenses
To the Empress Josephine’s Statue
Supplication to the Muses on a Trying Day
“The sea raised up a campanile . . . The wind I heard”
Eternity
“So dream thy sails, O phantom bark”
A Postscript
The Sad Indian
“I have that sure enclitic to my act”
The Pillar and the Post
The Visible the Untrue
“Shall I subsume the shadow of the world—”
“Tenderness and resolution”
“Time cannot be worn strapped to the supple wrist”
“I rob my breast to reach those altitudes—”
“Enrich my resignation as I usurp those far”
“All this—and the housekeeper—”
A Traveller Born
“The alert pillow, the hayseed spreads”
“There are the local orchard boughs”
“Dust now is the old-fashioned house”
“They were there falling”
Havana Rose
Purgatorio
The Circumstance
Hieroglyphic
To Conquer Variety

Selected Prose
The Case Against Nietzsche
Joyce and Ethics
Review of The Ghetto and Other Poems
Review of Minna and Myself
Review of Winesburg, Ohio
A Note on Minns
Sherwood Anderson
Review of Eight More Harvard Poets
General Aims and Theories
A Letter to Harriet Monroe
Modern Poetry
Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros
From Haunts of Proserpine
“A pure approach to any art . . .”